Helen Keller - Life Quotes

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Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight. True education combines intellect, beauty, goodness, and the greatest of these is goodness. When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.

Helen Keller
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Helen Keller
Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and every one, and make that Best a part of my life.

Helen Keller
The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life. If it be true that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it, then it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy.

Helen Keller
Certainly I believe that God gave us life for happiness, not misery. Humanity, I am sure, will never be made lazy or indifferent by an excess of happiness. Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. Happiness should be a means of accomplishment, like health, not an end in itself.

Helen Keller
During the first nineteen months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out. If we have once seen, "the day is ours, and what the day has shown."

Helen Keller
Happiness is the final and perfect fruit of obedience to the laws of life.

Helen Keller
Knowledge is power." Rather, knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge - broad, deep knowledge - is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man's progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life.

Helen Keller
My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges.

Helen Keller
What do I consider a teacher should be? One who breathes life into knowledge so that it takes new form in progress and civilization.

Helen Keller
It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.

Helen Keller
Optimism, then, is a fact within my own heart. But as I look out upon life, my heart meets no contradiction. The outward world justifies my inward universe of good.

Helen Keller
So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.

Helen Keller
The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old.

Helen Keller
It is the possibility of happiness, intelligence and power that give life its sanctity, and they are absent in the case of a poor, misshapen, paralyzed, unthinking creature.

Helen Keller
We have found that our great philosophers and our great men of action are optimists. So, too, our most potent men of letters have been optimists in their books and in their lives. No pessimist ever won an audience commensurately wide with his genius, and many optimistic writers have been read and admired out of all measure to their talents, simply because they wrote of the sunlit side of life.

Helen Keller
Your success and happiness lie in you. External conditions are the accidents
of life, its outer trappings. The great, enduring realities are love of service.
Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow.
Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form
an invincible host against difficulty.

Helen Keller
The beginning of my life was simple and much like every other little life. I came, I saw, I conquered, as the first baby in the family always does.

Helen Keller
The best and most beautiful things in life cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart.

Helen Keller
Now I feel as if I should succeed in doing something in mathematics, although I cannot see why it is so very important... The knowledge doesn't make life any sweeter or happier, does it?

Helen Keller
So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.

Helen Keller
I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine!

Helen Keller
Sick or well, blind or seeing, bond or free, we are here for a purpose and however we are situated, we please God better with useful deeds than with many prayers or pious resignation. The temple or church is empty unless the good of life fills it... holy if only... we offer the only sacrifices ever commanded-the love that is stronger than hate and the faith that overcometh doubt.

Helen Keller
One's life story cannot be told with complete veracity. A true autobiography would have to be written in states of mind, emotions, heartbeats, smiles and tears; not in months and years, or physical events. Life is marked off on the soul by feelings, not by dates....

Helen Keller
It is curious to observe what different ideals of happiness people cherish, and in what singular places they look for this well-spring of their life. Many look for it in the hoarding of riches, some in the pride of power, and others in the achievements of art and literature; a few seek it in the exploration of their own minds, or in search for knowledge.

Helen Keller
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.

Helen Keller
The best educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed.

Helen Keller
A person who is severely impaired never knows his hidden sources of strength until he is treated like a normal human being and encouraged to shape his own life.

Helen Keller
Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world.

Helen Keller
To know the history of philosophy is to know that the highest thinkers of the ages, the seers of the tribes and the nations, have been optimists. The growth of philosophy is the story of man's spiritual life.

Helen Keller